This piece will be appearing in the next issue of Red Ink Magazine.
http://www.redinkmagazine.com/main.html I will paste the whole thing for all of you, since I have all rights to it and all. James Welch is a Blackfeet Indian author and the winner of the LA Times Book Award for his classic, "Fools Crow." Great book, I highly recommend it. He was also a childhood friend of my father and uncles. I am working on adapting one of his novels into a screenplay right now. Ok, here it goes.
A TRIBUTE TO JAMES WELCH
By Bill Wetzel
Growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, I always knew I wanted to have a creative career. From before I can accurately recall, my sentiments leaned towards becoming a writer, filmmaker or anything in which I could express myself. My hero was John F. Kennedy. Of course, I wanted to be President of the United States like him, but I was also intrigued that Kennedy was a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, too. Now this was a goal. A novelist President. A presidential Novelist.
Most of my life, I hoped to leave my home, forget about my past and write great screenplays, essays and novels. Being an Indian was more of a hindrance than anything. I needed life experience. I needed to see the world. New York. Los Angeles. Seattle. Traveling through Europe and everywhere else I could think of. These would be events to write about. Stories to tell. Who wanted to read about Indians anyway? Who would read anything written by some nobody from Cut Bank, Montana?
The thought of living in a big city as a famous writer was so compelling to a little Indian farm hick from Montana that I nearly emoted tears at the precious thought.
I spent most of my life writing poems about loves I never had. A broken heart that was not mine. My stories consisted of places I’ve never been. I wrote about sunrises and sunsets, people and cultures I never saw or knew anything about.
I never imagined anybody would want to read anything about the Montana hi-line or Blackfeet Indians.
***
The first James Welch novel I ever read was Winter In The Blood. This was the story of a Blackfeet Indian, lost in life, struggling for an identity and tormented by visions from his past. A novel of extraordinary beauty, tinged with pain, yet wrought with the clarity of contemporary Indian life. Up until this novel, I never identified with most characters in Indian literature. But this was real. I knew people similar to the unnamed narrator, I saw them everyday. Maybe I was a little like him myself.
This novel changed my life and my art forever.
***
Wind. Blowing over my parent’s farm. Snow blanketing the landscape. Mountains in the distance overlooking a vast plain. The tinny taste of snowflakes stinging on the tip of my tongue. I hear singing. Dancing. Voices calling stories in the night. Here I am, in the waking hours. Envisioning at my dining table, but not there. In another world. Images scorched into my eyes from a place far away. Insomnia grips me. Holds me tight. I cannot sleep when language haunts me. When allure seethes inside my bones. When my pen has stories to tell.
***
When James Welch was attending the University of Montana, his writing professor, pulled him aside to his office and questioned his knowledge of poetry. Until then, Welch wrote rhyming poems about “majestic mountains and wheeling gulls.” He wrote of an ocean he had never seen. Later in his one nonfiction novel, Killing Custer, Welch mentioned how he always wanted to move to New York or someplace in another world far away from an Indian reservation. He wanted to be famous, to achieve literary greatness. Welch did not want to be an Indian writer, but a writer who happened to be an Indian. “The mere thought” he said, “was nearly enough to move me to tears.” Now, his professor, the legendary poet, Richard Hugo, challenged him to write what he knew about. About where he came from. When Welch said he was an Indian, Hugo said: “Go ahead, write about the reservation, the landscape, the people.”
And so this is what he did.
***
My inclination of the Blackfeet Reservation is one of bleakness. Hopelessness. I had constantly felt my home was a place where dreams have been left to die. A location, in which, the populace was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty. The winters are harsh and unforgiving, the employment scarce and the culture roils in torment. But, somewhere in all this is an undeniable charm. An allure that held captive, and still does, a young boy’s imagination. James Welch made me understand the connection and dichotomy of this world. Deep down, writing about the world I was born into was meaningful. Inevitable. The first time I called Welch and asked him for advice on some stories of mine, he was warm, genuine and encouraged me to write about the same things Richard Hugo told him to write about over thirty years ago.
And so this is what, I have done.
***
On August 4, 2003 at age 62, James Welch died of a heart attack, at his home in Missoula, Montana, after a year long battle with lung cancer. Jim was an internationally acclaimed novelist, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his masterpiece, Fools Crow, and was knighted by France in 2000 for his contributions to their culture through his work. I know him as a childhood friend of my father and uncles and as a friend who encouraged me to follow the same path that he did. For the last few years, I have carried around in my wallet, a newspaper clipping from when he received his honors from the French government. I carry this for luck, inspiration and to acknowledge that a man who came from humble beginnings can accomplish so much, by simply writing about the small world he grew up in. The same world that I grew up in, as well.
For this, I am forever indebted to him.
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